A Kinder, Gentler Speaker?

John Boehner is running the House his own way, not the way of his recent predecessors

On the eve of a potential government shutdown in April, a
deal was finally on the table to avert the crisis. House Speaker John
Boehner stared at President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,
and a retinue of White House and Hill aides knowing that his decision
would be the most fateful of his young speakership. He understood that
his handling of this first clash with Obama would reverberate for
months--and quite possibly define his negotiating authority with the
White House and with his 87-member freshman class. The tension was
palpable. Boehner, reticent both publicly and privately to delve into
the divine, did so now.

The moment bespoke Boehner's complicated role in Washington's new
power structure. Obama can't make big deals without Boehner--as the 2011
budget agreement made clear and as the summer swelter over raising the
debt ceiling illustrates. But Boehner can't deal without the backing of
his 240-member Republican Conference--or, if he does, he can only shed so
many votes and retain his credibility and clout. Boehner's speakership
is already a study in contrasts and seeming contradictions.

In day-to-day operations, he defers to committee chairmen to a degree
not seen since Democratic Speaker Tom Foley (and Boehner is possibly
even more accommodating). But on big-ticket items (passing the 2011
budget, raising the debt ceiling, reauthorizing the USA PATRIOT Act, and
even negotiating the lame-duck compromise to extend unemployment
benefits and the Bush tax cuts), Boehner centralizes power just as
tightly as his predecessors have.

Forget the clichés about tightrope walking: Boehner doesn't so much
balance as barter--he trades at the highest levels on the biggest deals
from a position of legislative strength as the leader of the House. But
he must continuously earn and re-earn that position and the leverage
that comes with it from his charges, especially the freshmen and those
closest to Boehner who purport to speak and lobby on their
behalf--Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Majority Whip Kevin
McCarthy of California.

It is not by accident that Boehner put Cantor in the room with Vice
President Joe Biden to negotiate a debt-ceiling increase and the budget
cuts and process reforms necessary to win House passage. Boehner gave up
some of his power to protect it. The debt deal must have Cantor's
fingerprints on it. Boehner's bartering is not only interparty, it's
intraparty. And he has protected his power in surprising ways--for
instance by letting his freshmen kill a multibillion-dollar defense
project important to his Cincinnati district and favored by other top
House Republicans. Boehner could have nullified a House vote to kill the
F-35 second-engine project, and at times he was tempted. But he
deferred to the House's will and, in the process, gained respect and
power that may serve as the glue for a debt-ceiling deal and possibly
others down the road (tax reform comes instantly to mind). Boehner, in
other words, is changing the speaker's office in subtle and
consequential ways.

Aranthan Jones, policy director for then-House Majority Whip James
Clyburn, D-S.C., and now a lobbyist and principal with the Podesta
Group, said that K Street has begun to abandon its habit of burrowing
into House leadership circles--Democratic or Republican--and is instead
building more-layered operations that seek access to committee chairmen,
subcommittee chairmen, and individual lawmakers who take the lead on
certain issues.

"That change, I predict, is going to be with us in Washington for a long time," Jones said.

Perhaps, but first Boehner will have to demonstrate that his style of
leadership is effective. He'll be judged not only by how far he
advances the GOP agenda in this Congress but also by whether voters
reward House Republicans in 2012 with another two-year majority or sack
them as unceremoniously as they did the Democrats in 2010.

His approach is not without risks. If, for instance, Boehner's
willingness to allow House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of
Wisconsin to craft a controversial 2012 budget resolution that would
transform Medicare proves a political liability for Republicans--as now
seems to be the case--Boehner (or his successor) could well conclude that
more-centralized power is necessary.

For now, though, the speaker seems intent on fulfilling his pledge to
change the way the House operates. Three experiences from his short
tenure provide a glimpse into Boehner's bartering-for-power ways.

THE RYAN EXPRESS

Boehner's model for running the House comes not from any of his
recent predecessors, but from Democrat Sam Rayburn of Texas, who
presided as speaker from 1940 to 1961 except for two two-year stretches
when Republicans were in a majority.

Republicans, not surprisingly, considered Speaker Nancy Pelosi's rule
autocratic and dictatorial, and the GOP caucus's antipathy to the
Pelosi era knows no bounds. But the new House leadership also heaps
scorn on Republican Speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert for their
top-down ways. "Under Hastert, there was an implementing of the idea of
winning with a majority of the majority," said Steve Stombres, Cantor's
chief of staff. "There was a premium for having to win every vote. Now,
committees are told to legislate. They are not being told what the
product is. The change is very much real."

Pelosi, Hastert, and Gingrich all consolidated power in
leadership circles, and that consolidation shaped the ways that
lawmakers--and K Street lobbyists--functioned. Gingrich set the process in
motion, tightening his power by ignoring seniority in appointing
committee chairmen, term-limiting them to six years, and increasing the
use of leadership-picked task forces to circumvent the committee
process. Hastert and then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay demanded that
legislation pass with GOP votes and almost never sought bipartisan
support on big-ticket bills. They also blocked Democratic amendments to
shield Republicans from votes that carried high political risk. That
generated deep animosity among Democrats during their 12 years in exile.
When Pelosi got the chance, she returned the favor.

"We just shut the process down," said Jones, the former Clyburn aide.
"There was a very strong desire among leadership to protect policy. And
if you're going to protect policy, you'd better make damn sure the
diverse parts of the caucus can rally around it. That means all the
committee fights take place around the leadership table. And the fights
are high stakes."

These tendencies--generated by Republicans and tightened by
Democrats--gave the House an "us-versus-them" edge that intensified
partisan divisions and marginalized committees. Under Pelosi, committees
still moved bills, of course, but they played a diminished role in
crafting them; or if they did write the original bill, the leadership
often overrode the committee's draft to appease party factions.

"If you are working the process in committee and you see the leadership change it," Jones said, "you feel disenfranchised."

Today's Republicans say they couldn't use that system if they tried.
"You can't get away with leadership-knows-best anymore," said Brad
Dayspring, Cantor's spokesman. "Protecting our members from a tough vote
is not something we can do anymore."

Perhaps the best example of the new paradigm is the budget resolution
that seeks an unprecedented overhaul of Medicare, a plan drafted
entirely by Ryan, who worked as a budget aide to then-Rep. Sam Brownback
of Kansas during the 1995 Gingrich revolution and served as a
backbencher under Hastert.

"We built the budget over hours and weeks, and brick by brick," Ryan told National Journal.
"We showed our package to leadership and they said, 'OK.' Usually, it's
the other way around. Newt did these working groups that he created to
go around the committee system. [Boehner has] been a rock. He's never
once tried to talk me out of an idea. He motivates through incentives
and encouragement, not fear and intimidation. He's a delegator, not a
dictator."

Stombres, a veteran of GOP vote-counting operations, said that the
Ryan budget, fraught with political risks that everyone can see, retains
a tensile strength because members understand it, believe in it, and
watched it being built. "The budget used to be the hardest vote we ever
passed, the hardest whip we ever had to do," he said. "This was the
easiest budget to pass and the easiest whip we've ever had."

Ryan contends that his budget--now under sustained Democratic attack
for its vow 10 years hence to abolish Medicare's fee-for-service benefit
system and replace it with vouchers--is a more durable political
document because he built it and sold it first to his committee and then
to the GOP Conference. Rank-and-file Republicans, especially the
tenacious freshman budget cutters, would have revolted had his budget
not taken on Medicare, Ryan says.

"We would have been dis-unified," he said. "It's a false presumption to think we would be better off if we had not done this."

Michael Steel, Boehner's spokesman, was more blunt. "We promised
people we would be serious about the budget. If we hadn't done this,
people would have known we were the same old Washington assholes."

The dominant narrative now--fed by polling data and the surprise GOP
loss in last month's special election in New York's 26th District (the
most Republican of the party's four remaining Empire State congressional
districts and in GOP hands since 1970)--is of backlash and buyer's
remorse. Top aides to Pelosi and Clyburn are certain that House
Republicans have stamped their own ticket to oblivion. Pelosi now talks
in ever-confident tones of taking back control of the chamber, almost
entirely on the strength of what she regards as the GOP's Medicare
overreach.

"If they had made the Medicare vouchers voluntary, we wouldn't be in
this situation," a senior House Democratic aide in Pelosi's inner circle
said. "By making it mandatory they gave us all we needed." Top House
Democratic political advisers spent weeks badgering party lawyers to
bless TV ads proclaiming that House Republicans voted to "end Medicare."
The operatives won, and Kathy Hochul, the Erie County clerk, used
Medicare to defeat GOP state Assembly member Jane Corwin in the special
election.

Amid the wreckage of the New York loss, it's worth
remembering that when 40 Senate Republicans voted for the Ryan budget--a
group that stretched from old-guard appropriator Thad Cochran of
Mississippi to tea party favorite Mike Lee of Utah and through freshman
Ron Kirk of Illinois and moderate Richard Lugar of Indiana--they did so after
that election. If those GOP senators saw a cliff, they edged closer to
it, not farther away. So did GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty,
who offered a qualified endorsement of Ryan's budget after two days of
(to party stalwarts) dissatisfying dodginess. To know that Ryan's
handiwork has become something of a litmus test for serious GOP
presidential candidates, one only needs to revisit Gingrich's version of
Pennsylvania Avenue Apocalypse Now when he had to backtrack from his criticisms of the plan.

FLYING HIGH, FLYING LOW

For those skeptics who think that "regular order" and "letting the
House work its will" are bubblegum phrases filled with air and easy to
puncture, consider this: Boehner allowed the House to rise up and defeat
a project near his Ohio district that he has defended for years. That
project, a General Electric and Rolls-Royce program to build a second
engine for the F-35 jet fighter, lost every dime of funding when an
amendment by Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., prevailed during consideration of
the continuing resolution. By a 233-198 vote, lawmakers cut $450 million
in Pentagon spending, the largest defense cut approved on the floor and
one that shocked and disappointed second-engine backers besides
Boehner--among them Cantor and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon of California.

The speaker's position on the second engine was clear. A GE Aviation
plant just outside Boehner's district in Evendale, Ohio, employs about
1,000 people, and Boehner and others argued that if the F-35 ever needed
greater thrust capacity, the GE-Rolls-Royce engine could and should
meet the Pentagon's needs. Defense Secretary Robert Gates opposed the
second engine (the project began in the mid 1990s with an earmark
written by then-Sen. John Warner, R-Va.), arguing that it siphoned funds
from more important defense needs. Presidents Bush and Obama opposed
the second engine, and each tried to kill it, losing every time to a
seemingly unbeatable regional and bipartisan coalition loyal to the
engine's makers and the concept of having a backup if the original
engine design, manufactured by Pratt & Whitney, fell short.

But when the House turned against it, Boehner was nowhere to be
found. Aides said that he deliberately avoided the floor vote so as not
to tilt the outcome. His absence miffed McKeon. The chairman's staff
pleaded with Boehner's aides to join the fight, which McKeon feared he
might lose amid budget-cutting gusto.

"There were some who felt he should have weighed in on that," McKeon told NJ,
referring to Boehner. "I didn't ask John to weigh in on it. The
opponents just did a really good job. And we didn't do a good job."

Rooney remembers the vote as if it was a dream.

"I thought I was going to lose that day; we had lost by 20 votes the
year before. When we got to [the needed] 218, I remember thinking,
'Please, God, no one change your vote.' Afterward, someone came up to me
and said, 'You just beat the speaker.' I was like, 'Uh-oh.' I'm still
sort of shocked to this day that we accomplished that."

But Rooney said he has paid no price with Boehner or any other House
GOP leader. "There was no call to the office. Nothing like that. Under
any normal political scenario in the past, there is no way we could have
been successful. The speaker had a parochial interest. This does signal
a change in Washington."

Rooney feared that the change might be short-lived. He knew that
Boehner would negotiate the final deal with Obama and Reid on the
continuing resolution and could, at any time, tuck funding for the
second engine back in the deal. "I did worry about it," Rooney said.

Reid's staff expected Boehner to do just that. In fact, Democratic
Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Patrick Leahy of Vermont lobbied Reid to
give Boehner room to revive the engine. At the start of negotiations on
the CR, Reid's chief of staff, David Krone, told Boehner's chief of
staff, Barry Jackson, that Reid would green-light moving the second
engine into the final compromise. Jackson said no. "The speaker does not
believe in micromanaging the Defense Department." Boehner wouldn't ask
directly for the second engine to be revived, but that doesn't mean he
didn't look for indirect ways to keep it alive.

When the CR negotiations began, Boehner suggested beginning with a
defense-spending number that included the 2010 authorization
levels--which made room for the second F-35 engine. When Obama and Reid
objected, Boehner retreated quickly. When the final deal was announced
on April 8, a harried Boehner took questions for more than an hour from
House Republicans curious about what was in--or not in--the deal before
finally retreating in exhaustion to a side room. There, he answered more
questions, as if granting audiences to individual members. Rooney
approached, and before he could say a word, Boehner waved him off.
"Don't worry," the speaker told the two-term upstart who had bested him.
"The second engine is not in the deal."

But time still remained. Lawmakers spent the following
weekend going over the deal's fine print. It is often at this stage that
favored projects sneak back into legislation, typically bearing no
fingerprints. Sometime in this process--the principals cannot agree
when--Jackson called Krone with a question long expected. "Is the second
engine still available?" Jackson wasn't demanding. He wasn't insisting.
But one last time, the most tempting perhaps of the entire process, he
was exploring what might be possible. Brown and Leahy and other
supportive lawmakers had been hovering around the issue. Krone said it
was very late in the process and that Reid's office would have to run
the request by Obama, Gates, and White House Budget Director Jack Lew.
Jackson told Krone to wait for him to call back. When he did, he
withdrew the request.

Krone still marvels at Boehner's restraint. "He never sold out his
members. The carrot was there. They thought about it. But they never
took it."

Rooney said, "We didn't know what he was negotiating in there." The
House had approved dozens of policy riders (something Republicans once
opposed on spending bills) and any one or all of them could be tossed
out at Boehner's direction. "I thought I was going to be taken out with
the tide like everything else. A lot of riders--most of the riders--were
dropped. The fact that the second engine was one of the ones he kept in
the final deal, I just find that very uplifting."

McKeon disagrees with the outcome. His 2012 defense authorization
bill seeks to revive the second engine by allowing GE and Rolls-Royce to
fund development on their own and retain access to Defense Department
facilities and by preventing any destruction of existing tooling and
design. "I don't think the issue is over." McKeon knows that it's up to
his committee to turn the tide. Boehner clearly won't intervene, and
McKeon says that Boehner's instincts served him well.

"The will of the House is the will of the House," McKeon said. "To
overcome that vote just because he was the speaker would have damaged
his credibility and undermined his leadership."

BOEHNER AND THE BUDGET ABYSS

Obama couldn't deny Boehner time to pray any more than he could force
Boehner to produce 218 votes--the second and equally important (though
often underappreciated) step in translating a budget deal into
legislation. Boehner left the Oval Office on April 7 after making his
request. The atmosphere remained tense as he and Reid made their way out
of the West Wing. The two had come to know and respect each other
during weeks of private negotiations and public fencing over the budget
and several near-misses on government shutdowns. Reid sensed that
Boehner felt boxed in. Obama had demanded that the speaker call him with
his answer by 9 the next morning. As Boehner left the White House, Reid
returned to the Oval Office. "I think we need to give him more time,
Mr. President."

"What do you mean, he's not going to call?" Obama said, incredulous.
Reid told Obama he could sense that Boehner felt squeezed and would milk
the clock before agreeing to a deal.

"He's going to keep his options open as long as he can," Krone told the president.

Reid and Krone's intuition served them and Obama well. Boehner didn't
call. Importantly, nobody overreacted. Ultimately, the deal got done
late on that Friday, April 8, and each side claimed a hard-fought if
unsatisfying victory. Boehner didn't get all the spending cuts he wanted
and Obama gave up more than he preferred.

Boehner never wanted a government shutdown, and he had conveyed as
much to Reid last December when the speaker ventured across the Capitol
to meet with the majority leader in his private office. The venue for
that meeting may seem trivial, but Reid considered it a sign of respect
and graciousness that Boehner, who had dispatched GOP aides to Nevada to
fight Reid's reelection just a month earlier, would venture onto his
turf for their first encounter as the Capitol's top power brokers.

"We have to find a way to cooperate," Boehner told Reid. "We have to find a way."

During that December meeting, Boehner turned to his chief of staff,
Jackson, and pointed to Reid's new chief of staff, Krone, and said he
and Reid would "need you two" to deal with budget and other top-tier
negotiations and that the aides would have to operate with candor and
trust. And although such talk might strike some freshman Republicans as a
preemptive act of surrender, at the same meeting Boehner bluntly
declared an end to congressional earmarks, line items of federal
spending that senators value highly and were in no mood to jettison.
Reid stiffened at Boehner's flat refusal to send any earmarks to the
Senate, but he sensed the Ohio Republican's seriousness--and, most
important, Boehner's institutional commitment to make things work and
find a way to forge deals, not blow them up.

This predilection led to last week's four-year extension
of sensitive and at times politically divisive government
intelligence-gathering powers under the PATRIOT Act. Reid called Boehner
during the House recess while the speaker was in California raising
money for fellow Republicans; Reid proposed a three-and-a-half year
extension of post-9/11 surveillance powers. Boehner pushed for four
years and promised that he would quiet restive conservatives who wanted
to make the surveillance provisions permanent.

That deal held despite a minor uprising by Rand Paul of Kentucky and
several other Senate Republicans. With the backing of House Republicans,
the PATRIOT Act extension had legislative throw weight. Rand's demand
for votes on amendments to restrict government access to certain firearm
and business records held up passage and forced some uncomfortable
policy contortions but, in the end, amounted to little more than a
procedural hiccup. At no time did Boehner or Reid square off and
challenge each other's commitment to national security, as had happened
in earlier debates on the issue. The deal got done--again within hours of
the law expiring--but done, just the same.

Before becoming speaker, Boehner told NJ that he would give
committee chairmen more power, allow rank-and-file members of both
parties to offer amendments, and encourage bottom-up legislating through
the process of "regular order." Six months into his speakership, he has
made significant moves in these directions, restructuring not only
House operations but also the way lobbyists approach issues, coalition
building, and paths to power.

"The diffusion of power is on both sides of the aisle," Jones, the
former Clyburn aide now with the Podesta Group, said. "K Street has
noticed and is changing. The vote structure is so much up in the air
now."

One measure of House openness is the growing number of floor
amendments and subsequent roll-call votes--the most vivid expression of
partisan and policy preferences. So far in this Congress, the House has
considered and voted on 437 amendments; six bills have come to the floor
with modified open rules allowing for wide, though not unlimited,
debate. In the entire 111th Congress, the Democratic-controlled House
allowed one bill to be debated under a modified open rule and considered
810 amendments.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., has promised
that the House will debate each spending bill under an open rule,
meaning no limits on amendments.

House Democrats grudgingly admit that Boehner's approach has led to
more amendments, and longer and more-varied floor debate, but they
dispute that the process is as open as Republicans say.

"The question isn't just the quantity of the amendments; it's the
quality," said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., a senior member of the Rules
Committee. "Most of what Republicans have been doing is messaging. The
bills are written to protect their agenda, so amendments that would get
at their priorities are ruled out of order or non-germane. Things are
not as open as they say they are, and they're not as fair as they say
they are."

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the Energy
and Commerce Committee, flatly rejected the continuing-resolution debate
and its dozens of amendments and late-night sessions as meaningless.
"That was like a Potemkin village," he charged.

"I'm not sure I understand the criticism," Steel said. "It's arguing
that we're not bipartisan and open because Democrats didn't get their
way. Open process doesn't mean Republicans are going to vote for
Democratic ideas."

On that, McGovern does not disagree. "That's their prerogative. They
won. And it doesn't do any good to complain, because nobody is going to
listen."

By all accounts, Boehner's handling of Ryan's budget, the CR, the
F-35 second engine, and the PATRIOT Act has strengthened his
speakership. But the debt-ceiling negotiations bring big challenges.
Ironically, it was a legislative loss that has Boehner well situated to
deal with the tests ahead. Every House Republican knows that Boehner
could have played the prerogatives game and forced the second F-35
engine into law. That he didn't, Republicans say, has given the speaker
more flexibility and latitude. He will need all of both that he can get,
because the issues and the negotiations will only get tougher.